Gerwald Rockenschaub

28 November 2000 - 20 January 2001

Victoria Miro Gallery I

Gerwald Rockenschaub

28 November 2000 - 20 January 2001

Victoria Miro Gallery I

Information

16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

Gerwald Rockenschaub’s sculpture is concerned with investigating the context in which we live, representing moments of reflection and analysis of the predominant visual culture triggered by the mass media. He analyses the function of symbols and reappraises the idea of the functional/non functional object. With his large inflatable structures Rockenschaub investigates the opposition of lightness to weight, “Lightness is an ideal means to define a space or confirm a volume.”

Rockenschaub presents a monumental inflated object made of translucent PVC foil pieces welded together and filled with air. The internal structural devices are completely visible creating no mysteries for the viewer. Despite the large dimensions, its immateriality allows the viewer’s imagination to penetrate a transparent substance and pass through it to the surrounding space.The space inside becomes visible by confining it, simultaneously creating a concrete architectural intervention which does not allow one to differentiate between an artificial body of space and a functional object.

Rockenschaub’s built structures, like the bench he is also exhibiting, often resemble functional objects yet are undermined in the most positive way by their on-going potential as repositories of applied meaning. “There is definitively a potential usability of the bench that brings the idea of rest and stillness into the exhibition, but the piece contains also an implicit criticism towards the classic pedagogic approach of museography to art.”

Rockenschaub’s works are thoroughly Utopian, they are directed towards another place that lies neither within the limits of art nor in the midst of our contradiction ridden life, but somewhere between the two.

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